Word: sisler
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...thought getting into Harvard College was tough, you haven’t tried to slip a manuscript under the thin-rimmed glasses of Bill Sisler. While Byerly Hall is stingy enough with a 10.9 percent acceptance rate, it’s outclassed by the enigmatic Kittridge Hall just past the Quad, home to Harvard University Press (HUP) and Sisler, its director. Just 140 new books a year make it past the four layers of internal editing, outside reviews and faculty consideration to see the light of print, while at least 10 times that number find their way to the circular...
...economic downturn has made publication decisions more important than ever. Job listings, especially for tenure-track positions, were down 20 percent this year according to the Modern Language Association (MLA). Of course, the fiercer the competition for a diminishing number of purely academic titles, the finer the hairs Sisler and his editors must split when deciding whom to publish—and the greater the power they wield...
...priorities. Over his 12 years as director, he has improved communication between editors, expanded the sciences book list, investigated taking HUP online and consolidated the power of his own office. As the rest of the industry has caught up to the innovations that modernized HUP 30 years ago, Sisler has kept Harvard at the forefront of the publishing world. The ever-increasing numbers of academic dreams he defers are nothing more than the unavoidable human collateral damage from keeping HUP prestigious and fiscally solvent...
...presses may be the only companies in America devoted to selling products that most people don’t want. While the rest of the publishing industry chases after bestsellers, university presses are designed to print academically important but economically unviable works of scholarship. According to an article by Sisler in Learned Publishing magazine, university presses produce nearly 15 percent of the titles published annually, but earn under two percent of total industry revenues, and account for just one tenth of a percent of all books sold in the country...
HUP’s competitors quickly followed Rosenthal’s direction, and the Chinese wall around the academic press began to crumble. Today, Sisler says, the University expects HUP to be financially self-sufficient—a tall order in the current economy even for strictly commercial publishing houses...